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I find them fine in cases where I'm not trying to sound like a proper drummer. That is, I've made a few tracks that kind of suit having a rigid electronica edge with the drums. More recently though, I've been doing some guitar-based stuff, and I feel like I'm using Reason as little more than a jumped up metronome.

My question would be this: is it worth me bustin mer bawls to try and work out how to make them sound more natural? There's a wealth of tricks and tips out there, but this seems like a waste if it's always going to sound awful.

I guess the alternative is to give up on the idea of them being natural sounding. Lots of sample-chopping perhaps. I've been trying to think of some artists who manage to do this well; the NoTwist maybe? 65daysofstatic? How about examples of heavier stuff? Anyone had any similar thoughts or got any general tips..?

Even with shitty-sounding samples, as long as you think like a drummer and program accordingly, you can still get quite decent effects. In my own limited experience some things to note are:

- Drummers are human with limited amounts of energy; Some beats will be stronger than others - particularly the first of a measure (most music involves a very strong 'one'). Tinkering with the velocity perameters for each hit will go a long way to attaining realism.

- Drummers have only two arms. If you're writing a drum track that can't be played by a human being it will sound like it. Maybe that's what you're going for, I dunno.

- Less is more: When sequencing, the temptation arises to fill in every available event with drumming. Imply beats. Make use of ghost notes and keep a mind out for what other instruments will be involved in the context of the whole song. Try removing an instance of kick drum in a measure and just letting the bass handle things and see what effects result. Hi-hats are another example of a part of the drums that are doing acoustic work even when they're not overtly high up in the mix.

so easy to turn a pattern into a straightup mess by constantly adding to it. I read an article the other day about mixing hi-hats; the advice was to turn them down until you can -just- about hear them. Which sounds about right; I go back to my old stuff and in most cases I'm always irritated by the presence of the hi-hats and cymbals.

but still, it's pretty bloody hard to get decent sounding sequenced drums ala DJ Shadow or RJD2 ('Chicken Bone Circuit' for example).
Using Reason I'll often use a Dr. Rex device and re-programme the drum loop in the sequencer via the different slices, that way you can get the subtle nuances in like snare noise and weaker hits. It's also good to use Recycle to slice up drum loop you might have recorded too, it seem the key here is to think like a drummer which can be hard if your're not naturally inclined (I have problems with fills especially). But there's some good suggestions I've read.

I've taken to copying the slices to the track, and then going through it copying the slices up and over each other, rearranging them, etc; and looping it as I go to check it sounds okay. And then mark out a couple of nice stock patterns that I've created, and have use there as fallbacks through the rest of the track. Having a good sample here seems to avoid the problems with dynamics that you get with sequenced patterns.

with velocity editing (which is a cunt in Reason might I add, well Reason 3 anyway. Which I still prefer over 4!). The thing with the Dr. Rex is once you've got your slices to track you can't do anything else with them, which is okay until you want to add a fill.
I suppose there is a way around it, as you can import individual slices in to Reason's samplers. So if you take a couple of identical slices of the main snare hit in your Rex beat and say import it into an NNXT (or NN19) you could slightly fine tune the first sample higher as to give an impression of the first initial harder hit. It's a minefield though and it would depend on what kind of fill you wanted to programme, but you'd have to assign the samples to their own keys otherwise you get the sampler playing both the sounds at the same time, and then of course you have to conisder velocity too...